Existing User

Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and
remains for us a thing of the past.
- G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine
Art1

By 'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the
contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the
immutable.
- Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life'2

Vancouver

For five years now, every time I am back in Vancouver, I have
been taking pictures of a small modernist apartment building that
sits very close to Stanley Park, the large and beautiful urban park
that borders the centre of the city. I have been taking pictures
because one day I imagine that I might make a film there. I am not
sure what this film will be: if it should be 'about' the building,
or whether the building will simply feature as a part of a larger
landscape. Regardless, it's the building that I have been drawn to.
And even though I have taken hundreds of photographs and hours of
video footage, I still am not sure if I am any closer to knowing
what to do with this building than I was when I first saw it five
years ago. When I lived in Vancouver I must have walked or cycled
past the building hundreds of times without ever noticing it. It
seems mildly significant that my fixation or compulsion should
begin only after I moved away to a country (England) where
modernist architecture is not only hard to find, but its
reputation, until recently at least, has been rather battered and
neglected. Is it this relative absence at 'home',

Footnotes

G.W.F Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Malcolm Knox
(trans.), Oxford: PUB, 1975; quoted in T.J. Clark, Farewell to an
Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1999, p.371.↑

Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life', The Painter of
Modern Life and Other Essays, Jonathon Mayne (trans. and ed.), New
York: Da Capo Press, 1986, p.13.↑

See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Catherine Porter
(trans.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.↑

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